Although it might sometimes seem that way, photographs never exist in themselves. And this is doubly true of those made by machines or for archival or documentary purposes. As the art of Sanaz Sohrabi demonstrates, images (and particularly reproduced images) are part of often unwanted testimony embedded into dense nets of relationship…
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Wikipedia defines diorama as “a scene with a picture or images and other elements that tries to give the impression of reality.” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist originally from Jordan currently living and working in Beirut, focuses on this search for reality, or more precisely, for truth…
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We see something, we don’t exactly know what. We want to find out; we enter the image into the search engine. It finds something, we don’t know exactly how, usually more or less the right thing…
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The treatment of a disease unknown to experts, the media image of a terrorist organization, crowd sourced investigations and the techniques of representation, not just on social media… these are some of the many themes we come across in the media, in order to watch, think, fabricate and leave our own testimony, adding yet more digital traces…
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Apart from studying law in Wroclaw, the Polish author Agnieszka Sejud also studied at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Her training, therefore, is in photography, even though she presents herself more as a visual artist and activist in her work, often as a member of the art duo KWAS, which she forms with her ICP classmate Karolina Wojtas…
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Two recent works by Eva and Franco Mattes – Personal Photographs (2019) and Nostalgia May 3, 2021 (2021) – invite us to see photographs, and their authors, as online platforms see them…
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The Book of Veles has not only become a phenomenon in the world of photobooks, which it took by storm – it has even broken into the mainstream, thus contributing to the debate about the current nature of photography…
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Filip Láb, who died unexpectedly and prematurely in May 2021, was not only a prominent theorist and teacher of photography, but was also one of a generation of artists that dealt with the shift in political polarities and radical changes in the photographic paradigm…
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How can we relate to the history of Planet Earth through art? Katarína Poliačiková uses scientific knowledge and applies herself to research in her own practice, but what remains crucial for her is the personal perspective that provides facts with new meaning…
Daria Sazanovich is a designer and illustrator working for independent media and NGOs. She is most well-known in Belarus as a “socially engaged illustrator”…
Layers from different eras printed into a collage format act as a cross-section of the terrain. Buried narratives emerge through a series of pictorial excavations…
The traces of human intervention in the landscape, the extraction of raw materials and the development of our built environment are at the focus of a Japanese photographer celebrated for a series that shows spectacular explosions in limestone quarries…
Eduardo Navarro is an artist who gives the term “radical solidarity” a dimension we are not quite used to seeing in art…
The artistic practices of Nico Alexandroff, Robert Zhao Renhui and Susan Schuppli, where glacial sampling and analysis exist alongside the photographic, are presented together, where they have formed into something synthetic, something not yet clear but deeply promising in their capacity to perform multiple functions at once…
If dancing is a collective human way of communicating memory, history and identity, then the improvised movement is the physical equivalent of rap. There is a poetic revolutionary potential in freedom of physical expression, in the way a body moves and presents itself…
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The Viennese housing complex Alterlaa can certainly be seen as an embodied form of utopian architecture. We can find this monumental project, designed in the 1970s by Harry Glück, in the 23rd district, in a peaceful area on the outskirts of the city…
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Even several decades after the death of the versatile American artist David Wojnarowicz, his works have lost nothing of their urgency. Somewhere on the borders of brutality and fragility, he spoke through images, texts, films, collages and objects about injustice, suffering and the need for change…
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The films of Mark Ther propose an identity based on radical otherness. This identity is subversive and sexual but never obtusely political.
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Jeremy Shaw’s profile could easily be presented as the trajectory of a succesful artist in which long-term themes are convincingly developed, the productive complexity of their elaboration increases, and in which exhibitions in the world’s leading institutions increase as well as the works represented in their collections…
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“There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise”, begins a seductive essay by Audre Lorde. “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling…
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Associative visual games characterize French artist Julie Béna as an artist who uses a refined language to bridge two words – ambiguities transform unbounded speculations, thus creating a hibernating indeterminacy of reading…
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Every day we are flooded with hundreds of images of death, both real ones from reports, the daily news, and fake ones pouring out of cinema screens. Slowly the line between the two becomes difficult to detect, invisible to the benumbed viewer under the influence of the number of so many images…
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In a tucked-away courtyard full of history, Tereza Zelenková is exhibiting a collection of new works. This is a compact exhibition that works in a refined manner with the gallery space, creating a strange rhythm, suggesting a possible grammar and dictionary for uncovering the essential; that which the images and texts only suggest…
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The Polish artist Urszula Kluz-Knopek invites everyone to play a very special online game about our own death, funeral and fears connected with the thought of dying. The aim of this text is to draw attention to the visual dimensions of this project, analyzing the strategy of using photography and creating iconoclastic collages…
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Over the years, the Thai visual artist Korakrit Arunanondchai has developed epic filmographic traveling through past and future realities, using storytelling in all its possible occurrences, as a means to explore our living continuum…
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In 1996, Dalibor Chatrný realized an exceptional series titled Interpretations of Photographs by Jindřich Štreit. It comprises a selection from Štreit’s systematic photographic documentation of the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains between the 1960s and 1980s, uncovering the authentic and highly specific existential conditions of the local people…
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One of the protagonists of the project, the grandfather of the artist Andrey Anro recollects the following story. During the construction of new socialist housing in the town of Smarhon in western Belarus, human bones from an old Jewish cemetery appeared in the cellars of the buildings…
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Walter Benjamin’s saying “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” is illustrated in the postsocialist context in full operation: through different sorts of revisionism, heroization of history and themilitaristic cult of victory, death is instrumentalized…
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The name of the Finnish-Austrian artist-researcher duo KairUs, which is composed of Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle, must be understood as a play on words related to the Greek term for the qualitative, rather than the quantitative, character of time…
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For years, humor, irony and sharp critique have all been important elements in the art of Oreet Ashery, arising from her direct experience of an artist living in a multicultural environment who is originally from a more conservative background, socially and religiously speaking…
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Social video documentary makes up a significant portion of the work of the Slovak media artist Pavlína Fichta Čierna. A graduate of The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and now a teacher at the University of Žilina, she shot a series of portraits of people from her surroundings between 2002 and 2005…
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Gabriele Stötzer’s collaborative performances stand out from the practices of the late GDR’s artistic underground. They string together elaborations of the collective or the political, the (female*) body, and of art, in ways that challenged configurations of art and the political in 1980s GDR…
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She’s perfect. A silent listener. A forever young body, beautiful, sexually attractive. Her life becomes meaningful only when he is beside her—he who loves her, protects her, takes care of her…
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While Alžběta Bačíková’s experimental approach to documentary puts the transparency of the filmic medium in parenthesis, this self-reflexive attitude does not operate at the expense of creating an empathic relation between artist and protagonist, subject and viewer…
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Polish artist Karolina Wojtas doubtless has a lot of fun creating her photographs and installations. This usually seems inconsistent with the depth of thought her photographs suggest. Even so, this is exactly what her photographs are: a fluid mix of various kinds of humor, bizarre elements, practical jokes, children’s jokes, and bullying…
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Although the German-Korean artist Heji Shin attained wider popularity through her photographs for the Spring/Summer 2017 collection of the New York-based brand Eckhaus Latta, which featured explicit images of couples of varying ethnicities and sexual orientations engaging in sexual acts, the true scandal arrived with her portraits of the American rapper Kanye West, who recently elicited controversy through his relationship with the incumbent president of the United States…
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One hot summer day, I happened to reach for H. G. Wells’s 1923 novel Men Like Gods. In it, Wells presents his idea of the world of Utopia. People here are precisely carved castings of ancient deities representing the ideal potential development of our society at some point millenia in the future…
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Radziszewski’s art, in its multidisciplinary medley, is driven in its roots by a longing to carve out a space of diversity and queer beauty out of misery. Be it the secret queer meeting spots in communist Poland or the place for alternative narratives on history, it is constantly craving for a less miserable world…
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Umění Karola Radziszewského, které je směsicí různých mezioborových přístupů, je ve svém jádru vždy poháněno touhou vybudovat nějaký prostor pro diverzitu a queer krásu tam, kde není nic než mizérie…
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Unsettling questions and statements written on camping tents that are placed in the gallery or in public spaces have become one of the trademarks of the artistic dialogue with which Thierry Geoffroy addresses his audience…
Literally overnight, all those meticulously scheduled plans for the next couple of months evaporated from our shared and personal calendars…
We have recently witnessed an alternative development in conceptions of utopia—through a transformation of the present and an attempt to divert us from the trajectory headed for apocalypse…
The nuanced work of Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda addresses the hopes of decolonizing Angola, Angola under socialism as well as the country’s present day, looking out to its possible futures—both global and retrospective ones…
In his Sociological Fragments of Living, the architect Jiří Kroha offered an original response to the economic crisis of the 1930s…
Like every utopia, Nomadic State is a country you can’t find in one particular place. It is not located on an offshore platform or a small island bought by a billionaire longing for his private kingdom…
Where is the commons located? Who owns it? Can I hold it? As an artist determined to restore the idea of common property to the minds of her audiences, Ruth Beale is preoccupied by these kinds of questions…
The photographer Hazel Larsen (later Larsen Archer) came to Black Mountain College as a student for the Summer Institute in 1944, where she took classes with Josef Albers…
Until recently, she was invisible. Neither Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History nor Manfred Heiting’s monumental Czech and Slovak Photo Publications, 1918–1989 contains a single mention of the slim, 48-page book Rickys Abenteuer in einer grossen Stadt (Ricky’s Adventure in the Big City)…
In his latest works and studies Novogen (2017– 2018), Stadtluft Macht Frei (2018–now), Means of Endeavour (2018),
and Spectrum (2018–now), the photographer Dániel Szalai focuses on different bird species as metaphors…
Jitka Hanzlová’s pictures are all, with a few exceptions, in strikingly small format. She does not take advantage of the enormous dimensions and pomposity of the large format; she does not compete with billboards in the image of streets from the last
ten years…
Neozoon, founded in 2019 in Berlin, is an anonymous collective of female artists. The members share an interest in therepresentation of the human-animal relationship, animal rights activism as well as the paradigm shift in the sciences towards non-hierarchical human-animal studies…
To gather on the other side of the “common“ (common ground, common habitat, common values) that defines our coexistence…
The modern perception of the world of other animals and “nature” more generally within the photographic medium is indelibly linked to moments of voyeurism, anthropomorphism, and fetishism…
Providing a basic description of Pierre Huyghe’s 2010 work Zoodrama is simple: a living ocean ecosystem in a glass aquarium. However, this seemingly straightforward marine animal spectacle makes present the tension between the human and the non-human, following up on the artist’s favorite themes…
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Fatoumata Diabaté is a strong female voice from West Africa who reinterprets the cultural and visual heritage of the continent in a new and often surprising manner.
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In the last six years, Olof Olsson toured Europe with 150kg of luggage and his Driving the Blues Away stand-up several times. During the breaks, he performed in his Copenhagen flat every week, often with extra additions…
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The recreational compound of Vystrkov on the banks of the Orlík dam was built in the early 1960s. It consists of fifteen villas and a central hotel, all in the Brussels style. The compound was built by architects and builders who were imprisoned and abused for working on similar projects during the previous regime…
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In his work, Svätopluk Mikyta has used reinterpretation and visual comments of discovered reproductions and photographs as a visual platform for a long time. The trained graphic artist flirts and experiments with painting, drawing, installations and video performances combined with photographs and images from the 1930s and 1940s he collected during his travels and exhibitions throughout Europe…
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We approach Jiří Kovanda’s collages and paintings that date back to the critical turning point of socialism/capitalism with a certain degree of consternation: they create an image of us – the incorrigible us, the laughable us, and the small us…
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One way to deal with situations where there is a risk of losing control is to create systems of mental and physical order – clean up, take notes, create lists, keep records – gain distance and an overview…
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Over the course of several years, Fotograf magazine has had to bid a final farewell to the three noteworthy photographers who produced – and for decades supplemented – the extremely expansive portrait collection entitled Czech People…
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The work of German photographer Ulrich Wüst is a unique record of the lost and/or transforming East German culture, cities, and landscapes. Dieter Roelstrate, the curator of the exhibition of Wüst’s photographs at documenta 14, noted that he can see “renewed interest in the erasure of East German culture and history in particular” in the persisting division between East and West, which according to him, still shapes the ideas of the value of art and aesthetic expression in contemporary Europe…
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The collection of photographs by Dagmar Hochová (1926-2012), taken in the Czech National Council (ČNR) in the early 1990s, is a kind of novelty. Even those who know the artist’s work well have little relevant information about the series because it has not been fully integrated into her life story yet…
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Pavel Jasanský (born in 1938) studied geology; however, he did not work as a geologist for too long. During his university studies, he extensively photographed, and he followed this vocation in the 1960s…
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Simon Menner’s photographic practice is concerned with surveillance and pictorial propaganda as the main mechanisms of power in our current conflict-driven times. In the context of post-truth politics, his work feels even more pertinent…
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Gender and class – the two categories of feminist and Marxist theories – have been conflated in Soviet ideology into the hybrid term of a “working mother”: an oxymoron featuring a female figure both submissive and revolutionary, domestic and public, feminine and masculine…
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The artistic duo of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák has played a central role in Czech art of the past twenty years, contributing fundamentally to redefining the position of photography within contemporary Czech art…
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Christopher Niedenthal was born in a London family of Polish immigrants in the postwar years. Taking photographs in London, however, failed to satisfy him. He felt a lot more attracted to Poland – not to its communist regime, but to life in Poland and young Polish people who seemed more open, friendlier to him…
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To look back means to look into your own fabulous face. In principle, it is like looking at an old woman’s face trying to see a girl in a school photo. The girl was sitting in front, second on the left, and the old woman still has the same lips and eyes like when she was eight…
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Film and media artist Harun Farocki insisted on proving that there is an aesthetic basis to the negative dialectics of the contemporary, technologically conditioned and mediated world of repression, and that this aesthetic basis is the path towards a new rationality of abandoned humaneness…
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If Monsanto were a villain, its cinematic depiction would be on par with other current popular antagonists. The name of this global American corporation which trades mostly in agricultural pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and pharmaceutic products has appeared in a large number of documentaries and activist films, especially in connection with Monsanto’s breaching of ethical and health standards…
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Slagheaps are among the most visible remains of deep mining, although their traces in the landscape relief cease to be visible in time: artificial reclamation or spontaneous successions blur the inappropriateness of the slagheaps, which gradually blend in with the surrounding landscape…
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“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates.” Susan Sontag On Photography
An encounter with an artwork when the work becomes our personal property is always a very complex act…
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When Groupe Guma Guar organized an exhibition in the sam83 Gallery in the small village of Česká Bříza last year, it was not only an unexpected reunion of this audio-visual group that has greatly affected the Czech engaged art of the previous decade…
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4 December 2015. At the Art Basel fair in Miami Beach, a visitor stabbed another one in the shoulder and neck in the Nova section devoted to young artists. Onlookers thought the attack was a performance, especially after the scene was bounded by a police tape…
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In 2014, photographer Stanislav Krupař and German journalist Wolfgang Bauer did a daring deed. Together with a group of Syrian refugees, they tried to travel undercover across the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Europe…
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It feels strange to click on a virtual map of routes taken by hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men and women to escape the war frenzy, enjoying the comfort of a European city. The Map of Displacement was created by Darst Projects, a documentary studio, and Metrography, the first Iraqi photo agency…
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The Sochi Project is almost as ungraspable as the North Caucasus that it describes. A documentary-reportage epic by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, seven years in the making, features an interactive website, several books, a wealth of images and solid text…
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Totaleinsatz (Forced Labour), the most famous collection of photographs by Czech photographer Zdeněk Tmej (1920–2004), was created between 1942 and 1944, when the author was forced to heavy labour in Wroclaw, Poland…
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In the high season of customers storming shops, Tytus Szabelski found a job with Amazon. At first sight, it is hard to imagine how much the photographer infiltrated the company’s warehouses in Poland…
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Kunsthalle Wien crowned their 2018 dramaturgy with the exhibition project Antarctica, tackling the sociological term “alienation,” prominently present in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose quote about moving glaciers opened the whole show…
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The expression of discontent is part of the perpetual balancing of interests between the ruling apparatus and the general public. However, the political regime of Alexander Lukashenko supresses the manifestations of the Belarusian public, resulting in the erosion of the society and its continual pursuit of change…
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When Seba Kurtis (1974) photographs migrants and their stories through the lens of his 5×4 camera, his images hint at a subconscious experience. His photos remind the general spectator of traveling; however, they are a confrontation with the hidden side of a problem, which is taking place not far from our daily lives in Europe as well as in many other parts of the world…
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A seemingly lonely girl below the cliffs of Manhattan skyscrapers is anxiously watching something hidden behind the film still frame… The probably most often reproduced photograph from the Untitled Film Stills series by Cindy Sherman is a classic of piece of feminist art today…
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“Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen work across objects, installation, and film that explore process of production as cultural, personal, and political practices.” The fact that in the brief profile in the heading of their website Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, an artistic duo with Israeli and Belgian roots respectively, speak about “production” and “practices” and not artistic work is certainly not without significance…
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V textu The Perfect Con z roku 2016 pro e-flux journal se Mari Bastashevski zamýšlí nad možnostmi institucionální kritiky v umění. Úvahou nad důležitostí nerezignovat na vývoj kritických strategií uzavírá esej, v níž shrnuje své působení v rámci umělecké rezidence na lodi izraelské námořní společnosti ZIM, jednoho z největších globálních lodních dopravců…
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Carrie Mae Weems is one of the key figures of American photography
who asserted themselves on the scene during the second half of the 20th
century, all strongly influenced by the dynamic social events of that time…
On 28 December 1895, at their founding screening in Grand Café in
Paris, the Lumière brothers presented ten films, including “Employees
Leaving the Lumière Factory”. One of the very first motion camera shots
had focused on a stream of people leaving the factory: a mass of women
and men, rapidly and collectively vacating their place of work…
Jakub Jansa has been an athlete, but he also has co-operated with
many prominent Czech artists: he has been influenced by Federico
Díaz’s experimental seedbed and successfully completed his studies in
Díaz’s Supermedia studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design
in Prague…
The Venezuelan artist José Antonio Hernández-Diez became the darling
of the international art world in the 1980s, at the time of the rising
interest of world institutions and galleries of contemporary art in the
artists and culture of the global South…
On the monitor, layers are piling one on another. They are dividing the
area, defining the horizon, outlining the perspective, enclosing the open
landscape, building walls around it. The walls are growing, intersected
by windows and doors…
Linda is a well-known graphic designer; Daniela is a professional
photographer specialising in photo-documentation. But in the world of
contemporary art, they are known primarily as a creative tandem, the
Dostálková sisters…
We suffered terribly as we became our separate selves.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931
Anna, Anna, I am Anna, she kept repeating; and anyway I can’t be ill or
give way, because of Janet; I could vanish from the world tomorrow, and
it wouldn’t matter to anyone except to Janet…
“So much of what we do now is always with the thought of ‘Oh, how will
this look in a different mediation?’.”1
Three years ago it made evident sense to speak of the essential way in
which the perception of reality is changing because of the digitalised
distribution of reproduced interpretations…
In his work, the Austrian artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler (b: 1970)
explores the options of public space, describes socially and politically
engaged movements, and presents possible economic and political
alternatives to those which have become established…
The photographer Michele Borzoni is a member of the TerraProject
Collective – an Italian group of documentary photographers. TerraProject
was established in 2006 and, in addition to Borzoni, its members include
the documentarians Simone Donati, Pietro Paolini, and Rocco Rorandelli…
“We have developed about a third of the project, but the first results
are already on the table. I expect the first concrete feedback after the
presentation of the results. But I have a problem with the management…
A recently established law in France aims to protect workers’ ‘right to
disconnect’. It requires companies of a certain size to clearly define hours
when staff should neither send nor answer emails, and it seeks to ensure
fairly paid work, prevent burnout and protect private time…
The work by Danilo Correale – an Italian artist living in New York – is
inspired and deals with the phenomena associated with the late capitalism
culture and neo-liberal system of labour…
When street photographer Lars Tunbjörk found himself in an office in the
late 1990s, he searched for and found the beauty of the accidental, oblique
angles, and marginal phenomena.
In his Office series, the “legendary colour photographer of the absurd”
creates a variety of grey and beige tones…
The interest of many of today’s photographers in documentarism, picture
archives, and authors’ books goes hand in hand with the distinctive trend
in the arts and curatorial practice of the past decade represented by
concepts such as a “historiographical turn” or an “archive impulse”…
In his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from
1959, Erving Goffman, an American sociologist, anthropologist and
social psychologist, tried to interpret human behaviour by using the
analogy of the theatre – in terms of playing societal roles…
“The womb of the soul is where the inner world and the outside world
meet. Therefore, no one knows themselves unless they are themselves
and someone else at the same time.”1
The body is related to the visualization of human desire and the need
to make it in the all-giving and all-accepting existence in the limited
continuum of the universe…
Do you remember the dinner scene in Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie? Before the meal gets started, the guests are distracted by sobs coming from the back of the restaurant. Three females go to check what caused this sound only to find a dead man, whose body was lying just a few steps away from their table…
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The name Luboš Plný (born in 1961) was almost unknown in the Czech art world until the summer of 2017. Still, it has long been spoken of as a revelation in the contemporary art sphere – but only in the narrow circle of the initiated…
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Different time periods and different generations bring new issues. But what about the old ones – still present and still urgent issues? Foucault’s analysis of repression and power is compulsory reading today, but the reasons why it was written still persist…
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The following text is written for a photography magazine, but associating its name with Melanie Bonajo (born in 1978) does not have much hope for success. In her activities, Bonajo merges the skills of an activist musician, performer and shaman…
Read moreI’m reading your Manual for Unlearning the Body1, and I think that readers might want to know what the process of unlearning means to you.
I sometimes imagine a body that wakes up one morning and doesn’t remember any learnt movements – doesn’t know what its movements and actions mean…
Read more“Cyborg, short for cybernetic organism or cybernetically controlled organism. Cyborg represents the synthesis of organic and mechanical parts. Its mechanical components are usually non-removable and their assembly or disassembly is done in the form of a surgical procedure…
Read moreCarnal Fuck
Jakub Ra Svoboda
The body in the body. In the fluid. The hand in the body. In the fluid. All my saliva, sweat, mucus, ejaculations, and fantasies! Everything conscious! The body in the society, immersed in the matter…
Read moreIn the late 1980s, Ján Rečo (1948) created a series that strongly resonated with the contemporary photography – today, not many people know him. His photographs can give us a good insight into the contemporary thinking about photography and imaging the body…
Read moreJosef ‘Jožo’ Rabara is a lot of things – a photographer, music producer, and a host on the radio. Certain aspects of his art can be found in the wider context of his other activities…
Read moreFive years ago, Sussane Pfeffer took the post of director of the historically oldest European public museum, Fridericianum in Kassel – founded in the spirit of the enlightenment in the year 1779 and well-known for the exhibitions of contemporary art, Dokumenta – and based her radical programme on the theory of post-humanism…
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The author accompanied his 2007 exhibition, titled Jordan Wolfson, with
a letter to the visitor: “This is my first exhibition with the gallery and also my
first solo show in Germany…
We live in a beautiful brand new world. Technologies are ubiquitous, helping us live seemingly better lives. They have ridden us of all physical effort, making travel, communication, entertainment and work easier…
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In September 2011, as the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park swarmed with protesters in Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the hacktivist group Anonymous, the New York City Police Department resurrected an 1845 law that deemed two or more people wearing masks in public illegal, unless a masquerade party was being organized…
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“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me”…
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Britta Thie is an artist from Berlin. She is also a model, an actress and a dancer, as we can see in the Alien Babies clip by Easter, the Berlin-based pop band – which also suggests she objectifies herself…
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In October 1969, Vito Acconci made his fourth Street Work, Street Work IV. He spent three weeks following randomly chosen people through the streets of New York. He would note down the date of the event (e…
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“For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me’’.1
Calle’s art practice, passionately exploring the boundaries between the private and the public through transgression, is perhaps even more pertinent today, when we access other people’s private lives with ease through social media whilst at the same time we are subjected to observation through various forms of state-sanctioned mass surveillance…
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The situation of originality in the Czech Republic is difficult. One the one hand, originality is attractive; on the other hand, it is unreliable. “At the beginning of the 1990s, the digital revolution was invisible…
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“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection…
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The Army Unit 3255, abbreviated as AU, is a bounded area taking circa 1/10 of the area of Petřín Hill in Prague. This area is used by the military Communication and Information Systems Agency (AKIS)1 and by the Department of Criminalistic Technical Equipment and Expertise of the Criminal Service of the Military Police…
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To make a long story short, Temporary Discomfort started as a work on the global economic summits, at a time when Jules Spinatsch had lost his belief in classical photojournalism. It was inspired largely by Sophie Riestelhuber’s work Fait and her claim that photographers should rather work in places they know and have control of, instead of going to exotic destinations to cover conflicts they don’t understand…
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The life of the mysterious artist named Silver has been always accompanied by a fundamental need to create. His persistent urge to create and work on anything has manifested itself since childhood. That is why we can start the art biography of this protagonist of the new digital wave with the times when he was young…
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Most people in Western society find it certainly more plausible to believe in the existence of an identifiable universe than to accept the idea there might be something beyond our understanding, something we cannot apply any methodical system of research to…
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“Art is a history of doing nothing and a long tale of useful action,” writes Liam Gillick at the beginning of his essay on the work for e-flux.1 In the sentence, he has expressed a fundamental contradiction of artistic work…
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After twenty years on the contemporary art scene, Josephine Pryde started receiving more attention. In April 2012, one of her photographs of guinea pigs appeared on the cover of the American Artforum magazine, which also included an extensive review of her retrospective exhibition, Miss Austen Enjoys Photography1…
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Vojtěch Rada seems to create environments reflecting his extensive artistic education: he studied at the Department of Architecture (the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design; and the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Prague), the Department of Sculpture (the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design) and the Department of Game Design (Zurich University of the Arts), and he combines all the disciplines in his artistic practice…
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In her slowly expanding series Cluster, Viktoria Binschtok creates groupings of two, three or more photographs, always consisting of one older picture from her archives plus one or several more that she made by reconstructing images found online…
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Is it possible to consider the images by Jáchym Myslivec to still be photographs? What conditions must an image meet in order to be called a “photographic image”? Technology? A representation of reality? A certain relationship to the presenter?
Digital technology has transformed the essence of photography itself…
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Starting from the 1970s, Kharkiv – a city in Eastern Ukraine – became one of the first centres of a photographic revolution. Borys Mykhailov, Sergey Solonskyi, Sergey Bratkov, Eugeniy Pavlov, Oleg Maliovanyi and many others were photographers who went against the governmental aesthetics and developed new rules of the game – experimentation, boldness, self-expression, social realism, and synthesis with other artistic media…
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Ján Kekeli’s cycle Life Consists of Little Touches of Lonelines is, at first glance, a very heterogenous cycle. On the one hand, the artist works with digital photography, with which he portrays more or less traditional views of interiors; however, on the other, he uses drawing and painting to intervene directly in the photographic image or as another possible artistic medium in its own distinct way…
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“The medium used by Japanese painters is the monochrome ink sumi, which is applied with a soft, pointed brush, and only sometimes enhanced with natural pigments, or with silver, gold, mica, black lacquer, and the white powder gofun…
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In his all-encompassing exhibitions Slovak visual artist Martin Vongrej (b: 1986) combines photography, painting, text, and objects. Within his words, the image and the word are complementary components of spacetime animations of the relationships between the acts of perceiving and thinking, realised through reversing, cyclical, mirroring, or repetitive systems…
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An obsession with examining and finding the border between the possible and the impossible manifests itself in every work made by photographer Clare Strand (b. 1971). She became more widely recognized thanks to her 2002–2003 series Gone Astray…
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Mary Ellen Bartley is an important American artist who lives and works in New York. Her work often stands on the threshold of semi-transparent tonality, and that is where they are most touched by abstraction…
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The Gesticulations series, sometimes referred to as Systems-Gesticulations, was started by Zbigniew Dłubak in 1970. At that time, Dłubak was already quite an eminent figure in photographic circles in Poland, as editor-in-chief of the Fotografia monthly (1953–1972), the author of many theoretical texts, the co-founder of Group 55, and, above all, as the author of one of the first photographic environments in Poland – a series titled Iconosphere I (1967)…
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When I look at the Glass House photos by James Welling, I have a similar feeling as Murray did standing before “the most photographed barn in America” in White Noise by Don DeLillo…
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Petr Faster (1952) is not amongst those whose seek to draw the public’s attention to what they photographed and where. However, he does take the high road in certain things and thus did not keep his beginnings secret from me…
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The majority of photographers who stood out in their field in the 1980s, but about whom we stopped hearing after 1989 and have by now forgotten, either began to intensively focus on advertising photography, or they did not find a way to navigate through and present their work under the new conditions…
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Thanks to the light reflectance values of black and white, their varied tonality, contrast, and brightness contained within a wide range of shades, black and white photography has acquired the ability to express an extraordinarily persuasive imaginative nuance of reality and fantasy, dreams and reality, idyll and horror – the atmospheres of our lives…
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The oeuvre of Jan Svoboda (1934–1990), one of the crucial figures of Czech post-war art, although easily divided into distinct periods, continually and determinedly explores the very essence of photographic depiction, questioning fundamental issues of the medium and conversing with parallel practices in painting, installation, and even conceptual art…
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The name of this group is derived from the first letters of the surnames of three artists: Tatiana Arzamasova (b. 1955), Lev Evzovich (b. 1958) and E. Svyatsky (b. 1957). These three Muscovites of the middle generation started to work together as a group in 1987…
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Mile Preslova works with staged and digitally adjusted photography. She was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1989 – 1996), first studying painting with Jiff Sopko, and later resuming her education in the multi-media atelier of Milan Knížák…
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Photography emerges in the mid nineteenth century from scientific discourses of exactitude and classification. lndeed, even as the new medium is structured around the regular division of time and space, so its images attempt to Iiteralize the philosophical and scientific imagination of the world and its phenomena as capable of being defined and described, capable of being put in their place…
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Photographer Soody Sharifi (born 1955), Iranian by origin and a mechanical engineer by education, has lived in the United States for over thirty years. Her work is concerned with the theme of the penetration of Muslim society by imported Western influences, as well as the natural evolution of that society over time…
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Human stories intersect and interconnect in wide circles. Perhaps the person we passed unnoticed in the street is more than just a stranger. The young Korean artist Seung Woo Back (born 1973) creates staged photographs of “ordinary” people who have in common their relation-ships, and above all the anguish that these bring about…
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A name conveying the impression of a DJ’s moniker in fact denotes an abbreviation for Emily-Jane Major. In her work, the young British visual artist (whose professional interests oscillate between the worlds of art, social sciences, gender studies and anthropology) addresses human issues at a more universal level…
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In a 1967 essay the French thinker Michel Foucault outlined the concept of the heterotopia. This is a space where, within defined and organised boundaries, and despite the intention of its design, there may be multiple and contradictory uses…
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A naked female body curled up on white sheets – amid colorful pillows, red and white, printed with rose petals and leaves – of which we see only a large, pinkish back and strands of brown hair: the cover photograph which opens the catalogue of the Dutch photographer Phoebe Maas, entitled Moments In-Between, is among the most painterly of the whole collection…
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We can say that the approach of each artist who works with photography highlights (whether intentionally or unkowingly) some aspects characteristic of the medium. The Slovak artist Peter Janáčik (1966) accentuates its fragmentary quality, as well as its dispassionate distance and sense of manipulation…
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Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd, are not only a Czech-Slovenian collaborative artistic team within the medium of photography, they are a couple in life as well. They were in charge of the workshop course Photographic Author’s Book during the 2002/2003 school year at FAMU, Prague, where they also completed their Master’s degrees in Photography…
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As a title for this book, I thought “Agony and Ecstasy“, but M. told me that it was trite. He may be right, everything is so trite. But I go back to the moment where nothing exists, where we can take everything…
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The culture of the Balkan region, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, has been formed by its unique history and a web of authentic traditions. The art which springs from this environment – including photography – rigorously pays homage to these ancestral roots, although this may not always be obvious at first…
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On May 13th, 2003, the Polish magazine Przekrój ran a cover featuring a photograph of the war in Iraq. Nothing remarkable in that – war conflict, natural disasters and social upheaval are among the favorite themes of media coverage…
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Young American photographer Beth Block graduated only recently (in 2001) in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has presented herself to American audiences at several group exhibits: in New York, California and Texas…
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Paula Miklosevic’s photographic portraits collected in the cycle Ideal Place are reminiscent of the approaches used in visual anthropology or related sociological research. Their aim is to capture the aspect and thinking of young people from Eastern Europe, and can probably be expected to reflect their experience as well as the local history and its current (mis)adventures…
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She thus meditates about the medium as such, its various forms, vacant spaces and processes that bring unexpected and startling fusions and insights.Within
the framework of a genre in its own right – a kind of “fictitious documentary” that is created in the same way as a photo-reportage – but instead of conveying information, it works rather the other way around – Kotzmanová embarks on examining reality as well as creating new, parallel worlds…
The Dutch photographer Paul Bogaers conceives of his works as riddles, creating combinations of various visual messages and offering them to the viewer. He does not use only his own original photographs; a regular at flea markets, bazaars and jumble sales, he searches for inspiration and source material – old picture postcards, amateur family pictures of unknown people, old book and magazine illustrations…
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Presenting only two of Jiří Černický‘s recent projects – and on those mainly because they employ the medium of photography – is to suppress the wide spectrum of creative activity which defines the artist, as well as his personal and artistic history…
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Hardly perceptible details, ordinary things and phenomena, so ubiquitous and mundane that we no longer even notice them, or register them only with superficial interest; and yet these are endowed with a depth and gravity all their own…
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Mário, how did your musical journey to Prague occur?
I was born in Malacky, in Slovakia…
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František Drtikol (1883–1961) was a widely recognized figure in the international art scene of his day. An active photographer from the very beginning of the 20th century until the mid-1930s, he firmly established himself among the elite of world photography and remained part of it even after he decided to abandon the medium altogether in 1935…
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‘Edison set himself energetically to work, stroking the back of a cat in order to produce a current …
… they used a piece of cable, fished out of the river. All this was very good, so far as it went…
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It should be said at the outset that Július Koller is not in fact a photographer, and photography is for him a vehicle rather than a medium of his photo-media oeuvre, which is so extraordinarily popular today…
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Perhaps only this very broad definition is still valid today, after the use of symbolic language has undergone such fundamental changes that it provokes the question of whether we can speak of such a thing at all…
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As a person interested in the history of psychiatric and scientific photography in the 19th century, the most exciting thing for me in Michal Heiman’s work is the way in which she makes those strange, painful, and complex photographs resurrect, gain new relevance, and challenge fixed perceptions regarding documentation and testimony, therapy and manipulation, science and art…
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For a period of ten years, the Irish artist Gerard Byrne dedicated himself to the phenomenon of the Loch Ness Monster. The outcome of his project was not just an exhibition but also an extensive book entitled Gestalt Forms of Loch Ness, which delves deeply into uncovering other levels of meaning, as well as the artist’s own methodical concept…
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“I didn’t want to go into the jungle to report on other cultures the way ethnographers do. Instead, I turned this perspective around to look at the heritage of my own culture,” says Christoph Keller…
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„Discourse is hardly more than the reflexion of some truth that is born
before our eyes, and when at length everything can take on the form
of a discourse, when all can be said and when discourse can be pronounced
about everything it means that it is possible because all things,
after having made obvious and changed their meaning, can return to a
silent internalisation of the consciousness of themselves…
Wrong, a series of photographs by the Danish photographer Aster Carlsen combines the relatively “innocent” form of the family photograph with manipulative interventions. In terms of both form and content, the photographs bear all of the characteristic traits of the snapshot…
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Across a wide range of photographic projects Ryan Thompson investigates the question of credulity — what we are willing to believe – and points to structures of belief as they appear in the realms of science, pseudoscience, and the occult…
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The American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) worked as an optician in Lexington, Kentucky. He pursued photography in his spare time, joining the Lexington Camera Club in 1954. He might have been seen as an eccentric, developing a harvest of the past twelve months at once, or cherishing a collection of junk (which to him was a set of Surrealist props)…
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We live in an era of post-production, of the subsequent retouching of photographs via graphic effects or digital editing. This represents a double-edged sword wielded by those aspiring to technical perfection and simultaneously strong emotional impact…
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Endcommercial is a project by three artists who study and describe fragments of a city. Dr. Wolfgang Scheppe, a language philosopher, Florian Böhm, a former professional skateboarder and currently editor and graphic designer, and Luca Pizzaroni, a documentary filmmaker, have systematically depicted identical elements of New York City and other cities since 1997…
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The abbreviation M+M denotes the creative collaboration of two German artists – Marc Weis (1965) and Martin de Mattia (1963). Their work is broad in scope, and photography is only one of the media the artists employ…
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Zbyněk Baladrán (1973) is a collector of film footage. The fundamental turning point in his work came with an advertisement he placed in 2003; in the first phase he collected around 16 hours of footage in various genres…
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Some philosophers warningly draw our attention to the compression of time – past, present and future – and the virtualization of the (photographic) image that goes along with it; an image which they understand as “expanding the optical scope” of the phenomena of the real world…
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If we were to look for an artist whose photographic diaries are not only visually striking and audience friendly, but above all present a profound message, we would undoubtedly come to the Slovak photographer of Hungarian ethnicity, Viktor Kopasz…
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The title of the series How to Hunt by Danish artists Nicolai Howalt and Trine Sondergaard is meant to be ironical, since it certainly is not a hunting manual or a documentary on the art of the hunt…
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Over the past few years, London-based visual artist Sarah Pickering has caused quite a stir on the contemporary British photography scene. Pickering – a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2005) and recipient of numerous prestigious arts awards – frequently approaches the creation of her large-format photographs like a shaman or chemist and a little like a bartender…
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These are the words with which Buzz Aldine, pilot of the Apollo 11 lunar module, described the lunar !andscape – words that could come to mind when viewing the landscape photographs of Steffi Klenz…
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Paramnesia is defined as the “distortion of memory in which fantasy and objective experience are confused.” It is literally a mental collision of fact and fiction that becomes in essence a new personal truth…
Read moreA beach is a place of activity and noise: Children are running into the sea and back to their parents or playing in the sand. Teenagers enjoy their free-time while listening to music and sellers pass by advertising their drinks, snacks or souvenirs…
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Recently a friend told me that lately she was feeling confused because she was struggling, wondering if the universe or world we live in is a safe place. Is it a place that cares, a place that looks out for our best interests and cradles us? I was bewildered by this question, because I have always thought that the world is indifferent to us…
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On January 6, 2011, the computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz was arrested after using the MIT network to secretly download a large number of scientific research papers from the JSTOR database…
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Rhea Karam (born 1982) lives in New York. For the first shoot of her Breathing Walls project, however, she returned to her native Lebanon, and later continued in Egypt. “I felt the necessity to document these ephemeral testimonies of life as a record of an important period in time,” she says…
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A large part of Italian political history of the past fifty years is undeniably shrouded in mystery. Until today, some of its stories and events, public and private, major and minor, remain untold, dismissed, and even censored, in some cases…
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To this day, most of 1980’s and 1990’s Polish documentary photography remains largely unknown to the general public, while in its time only a handful of photographers pursued the trend without claims to wider recognition…
Read moreThe 1980s photographs of Jan Jindra occupy a peculiar niche in the context of the impromptu photography of the day. Although most of them were created while he was still a student at FAMU (the Czech national film school in Prague), they very often depart from the canons that defined Czech photography in that era…
Read moreIt is almost 9 pm. I am standing in one of the PinchukArtCentre’s hallways, directly opposite the toilet door. A webcam is attached to my forehead, broadcasting everything that happens in front of my eyes into the exhibition space…
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“This is how, one thinks, walking slowly around the panorama, the past is shown to us. It’s about forging the perspective. We who have survived see everything from above, in one single moment, and yet we don’t know how it really came about…
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To cite a review of the exhibition that presented the legacy of Ivan Kyncl in order to mark the 30th anniversary of Charter 77: “Ivan Kyncl sacrificed everything for photography. Including his life…
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Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) is an American artist, activist, author, investigative journalist, researcher, photographer and geographer. In his work, he sets out to redefine contemporary documentary photography, as well as landscape and war photography, employing abstract and multi-layered images in lieu of naïve photojournalism, in an attempt to document that which we cannot see…
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I first met Eric this spring in his studio in Paris, during my curatorial exploration of the Paris scene. I knew his work from a few reproductions that had stuck in my memory, among the neverending avalanche of e-flux newsletters that daily fill the inbox of just about anyone with an interest in contemporary art…
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When the Lebanese artist and documentarist Akram Zaatari had a hole dug in a public park in Kassel, in which he inserted boxes featuring painted “photographic” objects which he subsequently buried in concrete with only their steel frame visible as a memento, he declared his stance regarding the relationship between photography and archive…
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“I can listen to it all the time,” says Urvi from the front seat of the parked car. The viewer sees her put on the song that she likes to listen to over and over again. “But I don’t feel the rhythm in here,” she adds, and the viewer slowly realized that the here that Urvi is talking about represents a counterpoint to somewhere else…
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Although it may seem that in his most recent book The Cars Wolfgang Tillmans used photography in a way reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in fact the way he has taken hold of typologically focused conceptual photography is quite different…
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The origins of Edgar Martins (born 1977) are an important key that significantly shapes the character of his work. His refined sense for perfect composition, order, rhythm and detail, combined with his technical processing of images, stem from his life experience and reflect the pulsating multicultural nature and thousands of years of tradition that are found in the southern Chinese province and former Portuguese colony of Macao, where he lived from early childhood and spent his adolescence…
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“This work presents a total discontinuity in my art production. Until now, I have one or two lines, maybe, which I follow in my works, but this one is absolutely alone and not in relation with other works, and I probably will not do anything like it in the future…
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The year is 1976. Poland is ruled by Edward Gierek, a propagator of the idea of socialist consumerist society. The Fiat 126p cars have been leaving production lines of Polish factories massively for the last three years and, even over this short span of time, they have already managed to reach the status of a significant official propaganda tool…
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Nine staff members had a total of three cars at their disposal – a blue Škoda110, a white Škoda110, and a greyish-blue Renault 16. The surveillance was taken over by a second group, consisting of nine members of the secret police…
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In 2011, seven Škodas with Slovak registration plates appeared in the car park behind the Secession Building in Vienna. They were parked there by Roman Ondák. He rented the cars from friends using funds from his exhibition budget, and drove them from Bratislava to Vienna…
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In some social circles, a car is as much of a fashion accessory as an expensive handbag. If you have enough money, everyone expects you to invest in an expensive car to prove your wealth. In other words – you choose a car that (ana)logically matches your standard of living… your social status…
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The joint exhibition Dome Zero – Budoucnost, která se nestala / Dome Zero – The Future That Never Happened presents the work of the photographer Šimona Levitner and the designer David Střeleček…
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The notion of prosperity, linked with progress, the competitive accumulation of assets, and individual success has always been glaringly visible in American society. However, over the recent past decades, things have changed drastically since the time this fantasy first originated…
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After discussing the theme and content of the current issue of Fotograf Magazine together with Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, and after a brief look through their archive, we jointly came to the conclusion that the cycle Kuranda (1998) which we originally intended to publish, and which is perhaps their work most systematically concerned with automobiles, appeared to be only the tip of the iceberg…
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As part of his project The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the LebaneseAmerican artist Walid Raad collected documents related to the contemporary history of Lebanon. Raad presents the results of The Atlas Group as a collective work, attributing joint authorship to several fictitious characters…
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Photographs of cars fall into different, fairly clearly defned genres, but their admirers, stimulated by the myths behind various brands and often nostalgically longing for older expressions of masculinity, all tend to look for confrmation of human exceptionality in a construction race with nature, chasing after an embodiment of strength, speed and elegance…
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Snapshot photography is mainly about looking through the viewfnder, whether you are out in the street, looking out of a window in a fat, or even through a car or bus window. It would actually be surprising if Bohdan Holomíček, who is renowned for his productivity, did not take photos of cars and from cars…
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No other technological invention has ever drawn as much public attention as the car. Just about any ordinary person on the street can easily learn how to safely handle a car without knowing anything – or even being interested in – what is hidden beneath the bonnet…
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There is no doubt that the photographs published in the books of travel writing by Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund have signifcantly shaped several generations of readers’ understanding of various far-fung corners of the world…
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People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down
The Doors – People Are Strange
“I have climbed up a tree; I see beautiful apples that remain out of reach, but I am closer to them than if I were to climb down… I must continue to climb, even at the risk of falling,” she writes in her diary in 1986…
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The Dutch moniker WassinkLundgren denotes the duo consisting of Thijs groot Wassink (b. 1981) and Ruben Lundgren (b. 1983). The pair joined forces while at art school in Utrecht, but even after leaving their native country they did not abandon their artistic collaboration, which then had to take place through the visual interface of Skype…
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“The celebration of abstract humanity becomes, in any given political situation, the celebration of the dignity of the passive victim. This is the final outcome of the appropriation of the photographic image for liberal political ends; the oppressed are granted a bogus Subjecthood when such status can be secured only from within, on their own terms…
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For over thirty years, Alfredo Jaar has been investigating the mechanisms of construction of knowledge employed by mass media for ideological manipulation, and exploring the potential of artistic practices as critical interventions and strategies of resistance…
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The extant literature on sociological photography is scant. Is there even such a thing as sociological photography? One possible answer to that question might be provided by the photographs of Pavel Štecha, illustrating reports based on sociological research in cities or larger localities (e…
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Jolana Havelková’s photographic cycle entitled Transient Meetings was actually created in the darkroom: thanks to a slight shifting of the negative outside of the enlarger lens’ plane of focus, the contours of the model photographed were strangely confused, as if veiled…
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Dita Pepe’s exhibition in the Prague Velryba Gallery provoked an unexpected response in January this year. With her staged double portraits of women of various backgrounds, in which she herself plays ‘the double’, she has managed to unite in playful exaggeration two contrary principles of post-war photography: a perceptive, engaged attitude combined with the imagination of staged photography…
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Ferdinand Bučina (1909–1994) observed the relationship between human and nature under various political regimes, in urban centres, and in remote villages. However, whether he sold his photos to interwar periodicals or if he shot them for Socialist narrative visual publications, the people portrayed in them were always intensively involved with the surrounding living world…
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The photobooks by Václav Jan Staněk (1907—1983) could be find on the shelves of many a Czech secondhand bookshop. His once popular publications were, however, surpassed by other books more in line with current scientific findings and the technique of photographic recording…
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Although Slovak neo avant-garde artist Peter Bartoš (1938) is a radical figure on the Slovak art scene, his work has still not been fully documented. Since he only selectively shares information about his work, Bartoš is difficult to access…
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WAM (World Agricultural Museum) is a site-specific work that uses the historical trope of the cabinet of curiosities to explore the introduction of biotechnology in farming. This 200 square-meter art installation recreates the atmosphere and the colonial aesthetics of the old Agricultural Museum of Cairo, to present the contemporary discourses on genetically modified crops and their various derivatives, coupled with the implementation of intellectual property policies on seeds, international trade agreements and their connection with food insecurity…
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To write about Michael Pfisterer means to become a critic of science. But of a science, about which no-one knows anything and ranging from a bee to Boeing, but is governed by a single, very stubborn and enigmatic scientist…
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When conjuring an image of a modern structure, which aspects of its design come to mind? In all likelihood, they are the elements which separate the building from its surroundings, rather than those the all have in common…
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In 2000, the Belgian photographer Annemie Augustijns (born 1965), a graduate in photography and cinema of the Institut Saint- Luc de Bruxelles, started traveling with her large-format camera across the various Central and East European countries which seventeen years ago liberated themselves from Communist totalitarian regimes, and have since become new members of the European Union: Poland, the former GDR, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia…
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The five photographic cycles of the Polish duo Andrzej Kramarz and Weronika Łodzińska, which together form part of the project Home, are coherent both visually and in terms of concept. The cycles present several types of more or less bizarre human dwellings, some furnished with loving care over years, some on the contrary quite provisional…
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To what extent are your photographs a documentary of vanishing reality, and to what degree are they timeless “images”? In an imaginary balance between the matter-of-fact descriptive record of reality and a kind of inner, dream-like perspective, do you tend towards the latter?
I do not see my photographs as purely documentary…
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What we no longer have is complicated by the way we remember it. A pervasive sense of longing ultimately indicates a link between the present and what is lost, what is missing, as well as, perhaps, what is regrettable…
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A list of basic rules which, according to Lenka Klodová, offer publishers of pornographic magazines guaranteed success with female readers:
Slava Mogutin is an artist whose work has emerged from a confluence of cultures and histories. He works across different media – including photography, video, poetry and performance – conjuring volatile erotic phenomena from these clashing orders of representation…
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Most Europeans see the United States under the ultra-conservative administration of George W. Bush as a prudish country, where millions of citizens are outraged by a fleeting glimpse of singer Janet Jackson’s nipple during a live TV broadcast, where there is an ongoing struggle to ban the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, where exhibitions featuring provocative works are censored, and where a growing number of young people voluntarily maintain sexual abstinence before marriage…
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“Everything is erotic, isn’t it?” retorted Adam Holý in his questioningly innocent manner, when I asked him what connects his lightly ruffled nature photographs with nudes taken in the style of amateur S&M production…
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Whether I perceive the Slovak artist Michal Kern as a solitary runner in the snow1 or a year-round walker – a tracker2, who carefully observed all, even the least obvious, traces, processes and changes in his surroundings, for me he is also one who left his own deliberate ephemeral imprints in the high-mountain landscape of the Low and High Tatras…
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One of the issues photography currently faces involves seeking for and defining its own identity – determining what photography is today and how its artists should come to terms with the 170-year-old history of this medium…
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Petra Skoupilová, (b.1944), studied reproduction photography but her journey to being an artist was slow. Through her work as secretary in the music publishing house Supraphon, she joined the Ashahi Pentax Photo Club at the beginning of the 1970’s…
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It was the evening. I got off in Líšeň at the ‘U Setinku’ stop and walked towards our house.
After a few steps I heard voices coming from my favourite garden. Here you could always see variety of vegetables planted in neat rows, every year with different colours and types of flowers, different arrangements of flowerbeds…
Read moreDifferent groups of people are given an instruction with an inbuilt premise that generates a friction either amongst the group itself or in the meeting with their surroundings.(maybe distribute the photographs between the text) Fascinated by group dynamics and the ways in which individuals relate to each other, Nina Beier and Marie Lund work collaboratively, creating particular social situations that are carefully choreographed and then documented on film and in photographs…
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Ahmed Abdi (Born and lives in Alger, 1983) visited the Czech Republic in the last part of 2006. Mainly he was spending time in Brno and Prague. Ahmed Abdi text comment on the Polaroid photos and sometimes his text is illustrated by images…
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For my Replaced-Brno-2006 project I chose five performances by five artists, which had taken place in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s. The main criterion for the selection was that their performances had taken place (or could have taken place) in public spaces…
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To believe in the journey towards the Why.
To reject studies, knowledge, the familiar.
To stand quietly.
Handy hands at hand.
27 July 1995, Petrovice u Sedlčan
It was not so long ago that Martin Zet’s primary school-aged daughter asked him how she should answer the question: “What does your dad do?” I would assume that the subject of this query advised his daughter to write in her homework assignment that her father is a sculptor, but apparently even he hesitated a bit…
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“It’s a new way to see the world.” [ref] Instagram. [online]. 28.3.2014 [cit. 2014-03-28]. Available at: http://instagram.com/#.[/ref] declares the closing line of a short informative text about Instagram, available on-line for those who wish to find out about the way the application works…
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I first met Jerzy Olek (b. 1943) in the late 1970s. He was already at that time regarded as an ambitious intellectual whose range of activity was not limited to photography. At the time, he was editor of the Fotografia quarterly, as well as head of the Foto–Medium–Art gallery in Wrocław…
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The UK artist Julie Cockburn is not a photographer, but works with photography as the basic foundation of her art. A regular visitor to junk shops, garage sales and flea markets, she buys old photographs, picture postcards and even paintings…
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The half-hidden but still clearly visible reproductions of the paintings by Tamara Lempicka, a chic modernist artist, captured in two photographs by Kateřina Zochová, a young Czech artist, are not unevocative of Art Deco…
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During the past decade the multimedia sculptor Jakub Nepraš has ranked among the most sought-after artists of Czech origin. After finishing his break-through animation Babylon Plant (2006) at the end of his studies at the Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, he continually developed the concept of combining the material-space object and video texture…
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“All photography is a kind of transformation.
If you want to do it or if you don’t want to do it, it is.“ Jörg Sasse
Jörg Sasse studied photography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) in the years 1982 to 1987…
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One of the youngest, though chronically busy and hectically working representatives of the Swiss-French photo scene is Maxime Guyon. He, just like many other artists featured in this issue of the Fotograf magazine, creates his own “artificial” worlds based on a fresh reflection of what our times offer us in terms of visual culture…
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Masha Ru’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in her scientific background. She has studied Mathematics and Computer Science in Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2011, she received a doctoral degree from the Eindhoven University of Technology…
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“If all reality is a computation from possibilities, then ‘reality’ is a threshold value.“[ref]Flusser Vilem, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).[/ref]
The title Parallel Realities echoes a title of a sci-fi themed book, a little…
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Towards the end of his book The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since Adorno,[ref] Albrecht Wellmer, „The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since Adorno,“ The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, trans…
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Richard Feynman, one of the founders of nanotechnology, has called his famous lecture on nanotechnology and nanostructures, which took place at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech in 1959, “There´s Plenty of Room at the Bottom…
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Taking Notice
What does it mean to “take notice” in a world that has lost its belief in enigmas? What exactly can we still call noticeable in such a world? Or to rephrase that question: what does a truly reasonable, objective and sane man see when confronted with the world of appearances?
Imagine taking a walk through nature and perceiving what you see as a random constellation of meaningless objects, worked upon by the abstract forces modern science describes…
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After about fifteen years of the unconditional dominance of the photographic image as the main vehicle of visual information in the age of the Internet, it has now partly retreated from this exclusive position…
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Gottfried Jäger, born 1937 in Burg near Magdeburg, started his career as an apprentice in Bielefeld and later studied photography in Cologne. In 1960, he started teaching photo techniques at the School of Design in Bielefeld and between 1973–2002 he was a professor of photography at the University of Applied Sciences, Bielefeld…
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The symbiosis of visionary architects with photographers back in the 1960s was as much love at first sight as a marriage of convenience. Passing fascination combined with lasting pragmatism motivated professionals from both fields to join forces in close cooperation – now thanks to the possibilities of the photographic medium they hoped to transform their implausible architectural fantasies into credible propositions by presenting them in a more realistic setting…
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Tammy Rae Carland’s work is completely focused on the personal element and therefore her characters are real bodies, real people; her work sometimes even includes the artist herself. Additionally, she treats photography as
a vehicle for performance, often exploring its relationship to the theatrical as opposed to the mundane…
In this photographic essay the artist reconstructs various periods in his family life from the perspective of photographic archives containing photos from
a range of commercial photographers…
We must imagine a world, where each woman will be the sovereign ruler
of her own body. In such a world women will indeed create new life, because they will not just bring new children into the world (should they decide to do so and in what manner they choose), but also ideas and thoughts essential for
the maintenance, solace and transformation of human existence…
“The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from…
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While studying photography and interactive media at the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem (2011–14), Petr Košárek went on a scholarship to the Accademia di Belle Arti, Naples. Ever since then, his work — which could be described as anachronistic, dealing with nature versus artificiality and originality versus technicality — has strived to merge photography with sculpture…
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Lukáš Kubec (b. 1979) belongs to the generation that experienced a period of disorientation. Continuous integrity, interrupted by the undermining of epic stories, spread throughout the Czech environment somewhat later in than in the Western world…
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A plastic bottle with a non-alcoholic beverage has become one of the visual leitmotifs of the dynamically developing part of contemporary art that we used to call, with some hesitation, post-Internet just a couple of years ago; today (perhaps with even less trust in the normative potential of both terms), we talk about speculative realism and objectively oriented ontology (OOO)…
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Maybe it would have been nice, if the Iron Curtain hadn’t sprung up on the Elbe River. Rather it could have been farther away – maybe even as far as Santiago de Compostela. In 1945, the Soviet army simply would not have stopped in the middle of Germany – and the middle of the way, but it would have marched briskly on, into the sunset, setting up satellite states as it went along: The Socialist Republic of France, The People’s Democratic Republic of Italy, The United Socialist Republic of Great Britain and Ireland…
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A few years ago, Pavel Sterec (*1985) decided to organize an expedition to a light reservation on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland. The participants were to come from different walks of life, and were selected accordingly…
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Petra Vargová does not rank among artists who overwhelm galleries with more and more of their new works. Even on her web-site (petravargova.org), which maps more than a decade’s worth of work, we do not find confused trails of projects…
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Simone Nieweg (b.1962) is a good example of the influence of place, time and even the experience of viewers on their perception of art works. Between 1948 and 1989, Czech photography preferred different approaches than Western Europe, accepting mainly those impulses that were in harmony with “lyric movements” defined as typically Czech by Jaroslav Boček no later than in 1962…
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The team of Jakub Skokan and Martin Tůma generally work together under the single pseudonym of BoysPlayNice. They take photographs for important architects as well as for fashion and other designers…
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Claudiu Cobilanschi straddles the border between art and journalism, campaigning as journalists do, overstepping the limits of a given media and presenting his audience with a complex problem as a whole, in relation to himself as a person…
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Gentle, but with a claw, beautiful to the point of extreme, perverse, yet not going beyond the limits of good taste. The work of Zuzana Krajewska and Bartek Wieczorek consciously balances on the edge; it constantly eludes definitions and seduces or fools the uncertain viewer…
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No two words better capture the free composition of this pair than does the name of their last independent exhibit in the Museo Nazionale Alinari Della Fotografia in Florence – Dreams and Shadows…
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She just lies there, embodies the whole of art history stuffed onto two floral chairs, she is shamelessly exposed and accessible to the fantasy games of whomever looks at her: the scandalous Olympia of Édouard Manet…
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The story of photography – a title which to any local readers remotely interested in photography will evoke the now-legendary book by Daniela Mrázková. First published in 1985, it presented a gripping narrative of both the personal lives and artistic careers of certain key figures and defining moments in the history of world photography…
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To intensely study relevant literature in libraries, to sift through museum archives, to seek expert counsel and call up witnesses, or on the contrary to ask no one about anything, to spontaneously head out to far away museums and, despite bans on shooting videos, to film there in an almost guerrilla style…
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These photos come from the image diaries with the working names, Shadow play, Perform meditation, Cold, Any change, Kertelö, Underdog, 13_5_08 and Distance of sympathy from the period 1992 till 2010…
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This negative photographed in the Kobylisy Firing Range was damaged in a Prague photo lab due to an error made by an otherwise reliable film developing machine. It revealed the layers and the rough image was distorted by the exposure of the material…
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The photographic series, Situation, evokes a linear arrangement typical of films or comics. Whether itʼs that we see individual shots as the fields in a film strip or in a comic strip, we actively fill in the “empty spaces” between them…
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Documentation and protection of Prague statues from the Normalization period in public spaces (www.vetrelciavolavky.cz)
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I walk here often and all of a sudden Iʼm not sure in which millennium this street actually resides. Itʼs like when a person gets up of a morning and springs naked from their bed and their body waits awhile for the context of that personʼs life…
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Stop –Olšanské náměstí /Olšanka Square (Tram5, 9, 26, 55, 58) fromthe centre. Walk back the way the tram came 100 m to the intersection of Táboritská and Ondříčkova Streets. Continue on Ondříčkova for 57meters, left side of the street…
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The streetcar is coming,
It looks like a funicular,
Itʼs really tiny,
It fell into my eye.
The series, 4 rohy hotelu Hilton / The four-cornered Hilton Hotel, was an attempt at photographic space definition.
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During one year I photographed views from the windows of the block of flats in Jižní Město (South Prague), where I live. I created time portraits of parts of the house via its external environment…
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The collection of large-format, colour photographs, Citizen, was created based on pre-defined points connecting the individual photos. These points merge first and foremost in an attempt to portray the various forms of modern life in big cities in the Czech Republic…
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PTenement buildings. Blocks of flats, yet also rabbit cages, overnight accommodation, boxes… No other space, where we move about daily and live our lives, evokes so many emotions, moods and contrary opinions…
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Probably some eight years ago, during a visit to a newly-opened shopping centre, I was struck by the conflict between my idea of what public space should be and what it actually was, i.e. as offered to me for consumption…
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Nothing was completely clear, but we had filled half a day with unconventional playacting.We had become tourists in our own home- town. As a collective, we had allowed ourselves to be led by Alvaer’s ideas, and we had not even asked about the concept of the whole program…
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Snímky z cyklu Kontakt patří k raným dílům fotografky vystupující pod jménem SofijaSilvia. Snímky zkoumají vztah mezi člověkem a prostorem.
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The opacity of Prague, the guarded nature of its inhabitants, allowsfor the possibility of projecting a variety of narratives onto thecity. In 2001 and 2002, I lived in Prague and worked on the pictures thatbecame the book “Czech Eden” (Aperture 2006)…
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This documenting of my lack of interaction with the environment lasted almost 3 years and was published in the form of a book that has run in 7 editions.
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Jiří Křenek mainly gained notice with his collection, Hypermarkety / Hypermarkets (2000), which was the culmination of his studies at the Institute of Creative Photography at the Faculty of Philosophy and Natural Sciences at the Silesian University in Opava…
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Cottage-dwelling – The Architecture of Human Dreams and Possibilities The Chatařství / Cottage-dwelling project started to come together in 2000, first as a photo-installation.
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The chosen images is part of the series I called Outside. It is a collection of pictures I made during my first year in Prague.
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I remember my trip to Prague in 1991. I bought ten cheap Russian films, which allowed me to be carefree in a manner unknown to the frugality of a student. I left the films there to be processed, and forgot about them…
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I photograph most often in Prague. In the majority of photos this isnʼt visible, but sometimes I “donʼt pay attention” and Prague shows up.
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For me photography is a form of protection against the routineness (mundaneness) of life. I personally believe in topics and visions (and by vision I mean the internal idea of the topic), wherein the photographer is personally involved…
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I never felt like I was an important documentarian. But when transformative social events occurred in November 1989, I did feel the need to capture something from this once-in-a-lifetime historical moment and it was at this time that a big demonstration was taking place onWenceslas Square…
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Prague. Beginning of the 1980s. I arrive as a FAMU student from the East of Czechoslovakia. I donʼt know Prague; it engulfs me with all that it has. I walk around a lot; I shift my eyes toward various places and corners that call to me…
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Štěpán Grygar refers to his work as primarily intuitive, often unplanned,and directed at the commonplace or near at hand.
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Pragueʼs Smíchov area is Poláčekʼs home district and Poláček is an enthusiastic expert on this subject: “Smíchov is like a textbook on the history of architecture: each block heading away from the city centre is another epoch…
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During the mid-1980s I had the urge to try something different. At that time I was photographing primarily people – portraits, invented photos in the atelier – and I had the feeling I should document something from my time…
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I came across the Jižní Město housing estate during my visits to neighbouring Petrovice, which I was also photographing as part of my work at FAMU.
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This photo series was created during the 1970s mainly on the periphery of the Prague districts: Libeň, Holešovice and Smíchov.
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The day before the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Josef Koudelka, who was thirty-years-old at the time, returned from Romania, where he had been photographing Roma (gypsies)…
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Město a jeho periferie byly pro Václava Chocholu stálým životním inspiračním vzorem, krajinou i celým světem, ve kterém nacházel vzájemné podobnosti, cestu k sobě i k ostatním přátelům…
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Tmejʼs photographs of the city and its periphery were prepared for an unrealised publication, Město /City, for the Elmar Klossʻ FilmPublishing House. Itwasmeant to be edited by photographer,Karel Ludwig…
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Josef Prošek was born 19 October 1923 in the Podolí quarter of Mšené-lázně. He died 9 December 1992 in Prague.
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Art always begins with an abrupt brush with reality unclassified in a rational system, disjointed from it, and therefore denuding the sensibility of spirit and mobilizing its strength, attempting to empower it…
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The project Homo Bohemicus (Český člověk) or Czech People, as it is also known – was initiated by the trio of photographers, Jan Malý, Jiří Poláček and Ivan Lutterer in the early 1980s…
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“Moscow Actionism”[ref]A. Kovalyov, Russian Actionism 1990–2000 (Российский акционизм 1990—2000)…
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”If you were a conceptual artist in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, it scarcely mattered what you did, as long as it wasn’t much, and you documented it,” critic Peter Schjeldahl once said…
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In 2010, the artist Lenka Vítková (b. 1975, Český Krumlov) exhibited nine black and white photographs in Brno’s Café Steiner, each capturing in enlarged format, and in simply formatted text, the standard visualization of a several-page long text document open on the computer screen…
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Congratulations. A baby fruit is born. Vendula Knopová (*1987) finished her studies in photography at the School of Multimedia Communication at the university in Zlín. Last year she won the grand prize in the Frame competition…
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The work of Boris Dornbusch is as elusive as „The fleeting scent in the very moment between opening the lid and just before removing the display protection sheet from a MacBook Air purchased a few seconds ago“ (2012, from the book YEAR OF THE MOON, 2013)…
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Magda Stanová pursues long-term analysis and critique of the medium of photography and the art scene through lectures, drawings and textual commentary. In recent years, she has been attempting to locate points of intersection between artistic and scientific practice, subjecting to analysis both artistic approaches and the processes of their verification…
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In the Enlightenment Era, a considerable influence on present-day reality, European thought imagined the body as an orderly, structured biological machine. The concept of the body has since undergone cardinal changes, even to the point of conceptualizing it as hollow, its surface coated with skin (“body without organs”)…
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Where to look for a template for contemporary visual poetry? This was the elementary question artist Barbora Toman Tylová (born 1981) posed. She approached the problem, thus defined, from the angle of graphic design…
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In our present era of simple, rapid and massive sharing, the mere fact of the existence of a work which has evidently been created with great care, and yet which has remained unpublished for many years, is unusual…
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The premise of the work of American artist Shannon Ebner is not based on Ed Ruscha, as was often noted, but rather on an interpretation of it by Yves-Alain Bois, presented in the early 1990s.[ref]Yves-Alain Bois, “Thermometers Should Last Forever”, in: Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, Paintings 1966–1969, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc, 1993…
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In 2010 Štěpán Pech, a student at the Photography studio at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, organized an event called Vernisáž / Opening. He created a fake exhibition of portraits of his fellow students from the studio…
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In 2011, several artists and architects were invited by Hans Ulrich Obrist to meet at a round table discussion at Art Basel, on the subject of “The Artist as Urban Planner.” Over the course of the last decade, similar gatherings of eminent curators, critics and others working in the field of culture have become an almost mandatory part of art fairs, a sort of veneer of theory serving to veil the basic nature of the art business, the purpose of every “art festival…
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Laco Babuščák is one of few artists from my area that works only with topics that he knows very well and to which he has a strong, emotional, almost destined relationship. He is also one of few artists with so-called grandiose and traditional ambition (in the positive sense of the word)…
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At the end of the nineteenth century photography was a new medium that changed human understanding; it brought not only the possibility to capture reality, but also a new experience as to how to handle reality…
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Vojtěch Fröhlich is an example of an artist who builds his works on the edge of media and the intersection between photographic and nonphotographic images. This can be seen in both his works and his life path…
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Tereza Příhodová approaches themes, material and space non-traditionally. She does not try to copy, quote or make variations on existing trends. She does not simplify the ideas that she has in her head, neither from a formal nor from a content point of view…
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DC: The relationship between drawing and photography as two means of imaging, but also communication, became the basis of your work. Could you please elaborate on the essence of this relationship? At first glance this can appear to be a difficult connection…
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Historically, the relationship between painting and photography has been an uneasy one, with painters struggling to find solid ground after the invention of the photograph, and photographers struggling to be recognised as true artists…
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Radka Salcmannová’s series of self-portraits, Over, was created as a thesis work in the Kurt Gebauer Studio at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (VŠUP). In it the artist has allowed herself to be photographed in limp, resigned positions and covered in a hard-to-identify, slimy liquid…
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Despite the fact that at the start of her career Jindra Viková presented herself primarily as a sculptor working with ceramic clay, at the end of the millennium she began to gradually use other media as well…
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Four years ago no one in the Czech Republic spoke much of Běla Kolářová. The same held true abroad, where she for a long time was placed in the international context by one person: Antonín Dufek…
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In her works American artist, Dianne Kornberg (1945), carefully adheres to a collection of rules that she herself established. She moves in an aggregate, where at first glance precise citations of fact intersect with the hidden meanings of images…
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Pigeon-holing, specifically as concerns technique, not only does not pay off in the case of Michal Pěchouček, but is also essentially a battle lost from the start. He himself speaks of how he set the basic premise for his works as multi-facetedness and free movement across media…
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Human recognition together with imagination knows no bounds. Thinking moves continually forward, it visualises that which is unnoticeable. We work with this phenomenon both in science as well as in art…
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In abandoned buildings across the world, before their destruction or their renovation, Georges Rousse has worked and installed his darkroom for more than 20 years. He has set up his nomad workshop in places into which he has infused new life and given it a new history…
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The phenomenon of “new painting from Poland” was born more than a decade ago. And despite the fact that it does not cultivate any unified style, that it does not create a group and that it works in a diffused manner, on the international scene it is brought together by its special humour and high quality…
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In 2004 Denisa Kera wrote about the paintings of Daniel Pitín describing them as specific pictorial “critique and image interpretation.”1 In this she drew on his series of images devoted to Alfred Hitchcock films…
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Provided this issue of the magazine discusses the relationship between photography and painting, in the Czech milieu one cannot forget (and on an international scale one cannot not point out) the work of Theodor Pištěk…
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Says the photographer, who for a long time has been peeking into paintings and drawing only to later find out that photography is closest to her heart and that she expresses it very traditionally: as drawing with light…
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The engagé transformation of public space in the City of Prague has been the focus of a number of art projects by Vladimír Turner (b. 1986), a graduate of the Center for Audiovisual Studies at the Czech national film school in Prague (FAMU), who is at the moment finishing his studies in Jiří David’s studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design…
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In 2003 when the US and its allies overthrew by force the regime of Saddam Hussein while the rest of the world watched live as Iraqis toppled statues of the fallen dictator in the streets, it seemed that the restoration of democracy and stability in Iraq would be a question of a few months at most…
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Photographer Zdeněk Porcal and multi-media artist Lukáš Hájek cast aside their individual artistic identities exclusively in order to undertake work with public space. Their joint projects in the past included the planting of dummy explosive devices (in reality these were just bundles of wires) in several locations around Brno, with a rather disagreeable aftermath spent in court (2004) or the Bombananas kiosk (2004) from which they offered passers-by bananas for sale with recommendations regarding their usage…
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Public space long ago became a favored platform for the presentation of artistic activities of various artistic realms. It is usually in an effort to bring works closer to people – to address those who may not have found their way to the gallery…
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Šejla Kamerić (b. 1976) studied graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. Since that time, a sensibility for the ingenious combination of text and image within an artwork has become deeply rooted in her activity, along with the ability to directly communicate with the viewer which informs her singular approach to photography…
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A small part of a swept pavement, several steps covered by a rug, a couple of centimetres of a painted wall, a pile of dirt between two cars with a flower planted in it, etc… Has it ever happened that you came across such odd phenomena in your surroundings, whose purposes and presence you could not explain?
Do not assign the existence of these mysterious sites to the acts of aliens or hardworking dwarves…
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Today the strict combining of artistic expression in the public space with socially or institutionally critical stances (opinions) comes off as cliché. There are certainly a number of photographers or visual artists, who use the public space in their work as a place where they can better formulate their statement and point out problem areas in the functioning of societal and institutional mechanisms…
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In 2003 Susanne Bosch spent six months in Istanbul as one of twenty-three artists who participated in a cultural exchange program between Berlin and the Turkish metropolis in the years 1998–2009. For Bosch this experience was a turning point in the sense that it was during the exchange program that the issue of migration became the primary focus of her work…
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The Toward A Promised Land project, realized over a period of 18 months by Wendy Ewald, the American artist, imparts a set of features characteristic of her specific conceptual work that is founded on collaborating with children, on experimental pedagogical methods and on using photography as a primary creative and pedagogical tool…
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The question of angle, or more precisely, a certain relationship to time. The angular relationship to time, the perspective. All this is said in David Stecker’s stance, a physical stance, the means by which he takes on the position of world angle (perspective)…
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The fate of Vladimír J. Bufka belongs among the legends of talent stolen by premature death. This creator ranked alongside the top Czech pioneers of artistic feeling in the photographic medium. Karel Novák and his strikingly talented student, Josef A…
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Milan Mikuláštík: Hi there Martin, I would like to start on a wider note. For some time now, we have been meeting almost every day it seems at vernissages. You try to visit all exhibition events that happen in Prague, and indeed there is no shortage of them…
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At first glance it may seem that Ivars Gravlejs is a photographer who is mainly interested in photographers and their cameras. This is seen in his older works, such as Excuse me, could you photograph me? (2005), when he had random passersby photograph him while secretly filming them as they did…
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Ingredients:
Concept, 5 friends x 1 roll of 35 mm film, a white wall (backdrop), a black marker, a ruler, and a curatorial vision.
Work process:
We take the concept, contact five random friends, we give each one a roll of photographic (colour) negative material with the instructions (expose “as you see fit”) and with the condition of return after use…
Roughly ten years ago a major boom of interest in photography occurred due to a significant drop in the prices of digital technology alongside the integration of cameras into mobile phones. The need to share photos taken in the broadest scope possible led to the establishment of social photo servers, where each enthusiast could set up his/her own profile and upload their photos into common galleries and obtain feedback from the server’s other users through evaluations and comments…
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Concept:
The author is photographed with people famous in the media from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In this way, a famous personality becomes co-author of a photograph capturing me, Viktor Frešo, dressed in a suit, representing the prototype of a smiling, successful, young man…
Recent developments in the medium of photography (especially the onset of digital technologies) have also profoundly influenced the nature and meaning of amateur photography. The hobby of photography is no longer just for optically, chemically and technically skilled individuals involved as members of photography clubs…
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SAD /ORCHARD/ is a moving, richly structured artistic and social project somewhere on the boundaries of photography, local history, agriculture and social therapy. Similar to other deprived artists or lonely curators, I went the way of involved social effort, implemented by researching photography on a folk, practical/commercial and – in part – artistic level as well…
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It has been three years since Czech cinemas presented the documentary film, Lost Holiday, the laureate of the 2007 award for best documentary film over 30 minutes at the IFF in Karlovy Vary…
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Pavel: I read from your bio that you started as an actor and performer. You then gradually became involved in creative collaborations with theatres, music clubs and visual art centers. You eventually began to photograph and film the events that you were involved with and developed quite a unique multi-media career…
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The path defines the time when a change occurs. It is formed of moments when things look differently, but in which it is not possible to persist. Along the way, we move in the meantime, which holds nothing „important“, but still „something“ is always happening…
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In available documents on František Dostál, you will learn that in 2008 he received the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic’s Prize for Lifelong Contribution to Amateur Photography. But what are we to read from this fact? How are we to understand the concept of amateur photography? The difference between amateur and professional photography is clear…
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Photography is the most obvious language for describing reality. What is shown in the photograph is reality, but, as we know from the history of the genre, much depends on the vantage point and intention of the photographer, as well as whom s/he shoots and how…
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To say that Joachim Schmid is completely obsessed with photography is a fair and accurate statement. He himself suspects that “few people in the world have looked at more photographs” than he has…
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Art historian René Huyghe aptly noted that “a work of art is a fruit that has fallen away from the tree”. This is perhaps the best way to describe the fortune of the photography of Miroslav Tichý (20…
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Problematice nalezených filmů jsem se začal věnovat začátkem devadesátých let. Oslovovala mě ryzost a pravdivost jejich mimouměleckého obrazového sdělení. Od samého začátku se můj zájem paralelně soustřeďoval na dvě základní polohy: Jednak na rodinné snímky a filmy mého vlastního příbuzenstva, které tvořily mozaiku mé osobní topografie…
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Karel Kašpařík (1899–1968) is known today even amongst photography experts as the author of three photographs: the avant-garde-conceived girl’s face (actress Nataša Gollová) in the picture entitled Why?, a detail of barefooted farmers, and a detail of backs of photographs sometimes entitled Work, other times Slave or even The Work Capitalist…
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“People with AIDS coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1985 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969”
A list of names and events, of an implicit significance…
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Before moving to New York, the young Uruguayan artist Silvina Arismendi (b. 1976) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. As a result, for most of the last decade she took part in the activities of the Czech art scene, participating in group exhibitions and holding several solo ones in the most regarded local off-spaces…
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Although the American photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1976, from the very beginning of her career her work has transcended the traditional notions of photojournalism…
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“The resonance and compassion in Adams’ work is founded not only in an acceptance of contemporary pluralism but in an historical conception of “public” that ties his work to a continuum, a tradition of productive debate and dissent…
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Every generation of visual artists is influenced by the work of previous generations. As a rule, they tend to define themselves in opposition to the generation immediately preceding them, while consciously drawing on the generation slightly older than that…
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I come from a village not far from Slušovice; later we moved to Hranice. The agro-processing plant (Agrokombinát Slušovice) was located there and during my childhood in the 1980’s it was seen as a unique phenomenon: on Sundays people travelled there for trips and to shop, for lunch in a restaurant inside an airplane, to look at horses and other attractions…
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Šimánek’s series, Ticho / Silence, is unique for Czech photography. First of all, it is one of the initial attempts to use colour photography artistically; at the time still looked down upon by the majority of photographers…
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Bernard Faucon arrived at the decision to devote his life to open creation by fits and turns. His loving grandmother – also an artist – gave her grandson a Semflex brand camera and thus taking pictures with colour film became a part of this growing man’s life…
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At present we can already claim in retrospect that the 1980’s represent an exceptional time period in Jindřich Štreit’s artistic work (as well as a time of significant production); a time bordered by two important events…
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Paul Graham is without a doubt a photographer who gave the 1980’s and most of all British society of that time a very distinct image. Similar to an American William Eggelston, of the generation before, or his contemporary Martin Parr with his almost naturalistically expressed shots of banal scenes he became a pioneer of the new colour documentary…
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“The universe is built in a certain way and I am trying to make my art such that it complies with this construction.”
Jan Wojnar
Since his youth Jan Wojnar (1944) has been fascinated with movement and transformation, nature’s endless game, the incomprehensiveness of clouds, water levels, snow, grass and grains…
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Pavel Hečko ranks among the exceptional figures in Czech photography. His work from the 1980’s deserves special attention. It is in its own way paradoxical due to the minimal amount of existing texts and articles related to the artist’s work…
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The kids are asleep, their beautiful land of Nod silently staged on a soft backdrop of warm quilts and fluffy pillows, presided over by an audience of dolls and the slumbering cat Sushi. Passing from photograph to photograph you can almost hear their peaceful breathing, as sleep is taken over by those deeper states of the soul that are our dreams…
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Karel Kameník placed a photograph of Ostrava, the place he was born on 29 April 1959, on the wall of a basement apartment in Prague’s Dejvice district. The snapshot taken by Viktor Kolář shows a neighbourly chat/ visit, conversational moments, which for us are understandably silenced…
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The candy-coloured embrace of two innocently frowning puppies in a collage, both sweet and at the same time wild, covered with rough brush strokes of coloration. The torn paper references one of Mark Morrisroe’s typical gestures, from which this early piece hails: brush strokes, cracks in paper, folds, creases and scratches; and primarily fingerprints and dust that he carried from the surface of the rough-handled negatives onto photographic paper…
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You once described yourself as a ‘curious amalgam’ of different cultures, a modest way of invoking a life story that has been crossed by some of the great fault lines of the twentieth century…
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Just a few years ago few people knew the work of Jano Pavlík (1963– 1988). Lack of literature, almost no exhibition activity, a hard way to access photographic legacy. A native son of the Slovak town, Snina, who came to study photography at FAMU in 1982 together with other Slovaks (later called the Slovak New Wave), and just five years later he interrupted his exceptional work forever with his voluntary death…
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With a time gap of more than a quarter-century, it is clear that the situation of a person living originally under East European communist totalitarianism, who as an adult shifted from one jilted societal order to another (capitalism), can consider that a priceless life experience…
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“It’s a matter of comfort. I am always available.”
The year was 1972. Boulder, Colorado, USA. Thirteen-year-old Francesca Woodman just received a Yashica double reflex camera. She sat down comfortably on the couch, tossing her thick hair over her face and she pressed the self-timer…
Read moreFor the 53rd edition of the Biennial in Venice (2009), Aleksandra Mir had printed a series of postcards (one hundred versions in a series of ten thousand, i.e., a total of one million postcards), that visitors could take freely from stands placed in the exhibition area, either to keep or to send to their friends and family…
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The starting point for minor observation and brief contemplation of the nature of Rudolf Sikora’s (1946) work could in fact be his self- portrait called, Ne! Ne! Ano? / No! No! Yes? (1980)…
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[ref]Text: Slovo jako slovo / Word as Word is used in Valoch’s own typescript of A4 size,Malá pocta Bohumile Grögerové / A Small Ode to Bohumila Grögerová, 1982.[/ref] From the start of Valoch’s active existence in the art world, his work has been inseparably tied to curatorial and theoretical activities; one de facto creates the other…
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The title of the present article is a paraphrase of a lecture delivered by Jiří Thýn when presenting his work in U Mloka Gallery in Olomouc in 2007. The title of his lecture, in turn, was a modified quote of the curator of the photography collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the action artist Jan Mlčoch…
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The work of Petra Feriancová is complex, as is mandated by the central theme she has pursued throughout her career. At the heart of her work is the fundamental and ever-present sense of clash and continuity between individual and collective memory, embodied by the images which help to form and keep these alive…
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The UK-born artist and photographer, resident in Melbourne, Australia, regards himself above all as a collector and archivist. Even in his own original work he employs a collector’s approach – for example in his series entitled The Small Conflict Archive, which contains various further sub-series set in the urban environment…
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“Many thousands people now own a digital camera. Many thousands more sell their personal items over the Internet every day” says a description of ‘Useful Photography #002’, a collection of photos from auction websites edited and published by Erik Kessels in 2002…
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Can one shoot or photograph one’s own death? It is difficult to answer such a question, not least since when it is being asked the interviewee is as a rule already not among the living. The Lebanese theater director and visual artist Rabih Mroué attempted to provide an answer on behalf of many of the authors of records of the last moments of their lives in his current project, entitled
The Pixelated Revolution…
The permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago encompasses nearly 11,000 works of art. In 2011, in an effort to map this considerable and eclectic landscape, the museum commissioned artist Jan Tichy to delve into the collection and to produce an exhibition…
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Marcel Stecker’s series Film Formats (Filmové formáty) was created in 2009, during his first year as a student of photography at FAMU, the Czech national film school in Prague…
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Malíř Jaromír Novotný (1974) dlouhodobě prověřuje obraz v jeho vlastních konstitučních mantinelech. Součástí autorského přístupu jsou také malby vývojkou na fotopapír, které ve výběru zpřístupnily Novotného autorské výstavy Viditelné formáty (Praha, GHMP, 2012) a Guiding Lines (Praha, hunt kastner, 2013)…
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“Cut an object in half, it becomes a model.
A model is a representation of a system.”
Christopher Williams
Although it may not be immediately apparent, one of the key themes in the work of US artist Christopher Williams is that of the world divided by the Cold War…
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Mohlo by se říct, že psát o fotografické tvorbě Hanse Aarsmana není snadný úkol – a skutečně to tak vypadá, i když pouze na první pohled. Aarsman převrací fotografické médium naruby…
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Vilém Reichmann once complained: “I no longer walk any distance, as my feet start giving me pain in no time. I think I will stop taking pictures outdoors, and take up painting on film.” He was seventy-six at the time…
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Telepathy and clairvoyance are generally not regarded as something experienced on an everyday basis. Perhaps even less common are psycho-kinetic phenomena, among which can be ranked also mental photographs, for even here there is an influence exercised upon matter…
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you
should not be there.
you
are not there. not all.
not quite.
yet
you can be seen
seeing
watching…
In 1928, Karel Teige published his Second Manifesto of Poetism. In it, he wrote: Poetism proposes a new poetry, which strives to set its cosmos into verse through all the media that modern-day science and industry offer, and which strives to ravish the whole universe of the human soul by moving all of man’s senses…
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Roads, the sky, piping, housing estates, fences, children playing, an abandoned Russian barracks, an extinct volcano set against the horizon, and then more piping. Snapshots seen through the eyes of mainly Roma women, and, in some cases, their children and grandchildren, to whom a team of students from the Charles University Faculty of Humanities distributed single-use cameras…
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Already at first glance, Martin Kohout’s work is not easy to interpret. The author himself, in an interview for Czech Radio in 2009, compared its [his work’s] reception to multiple readings of one book…
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When asked to define the film he was working on at the time for the catalogue of Modernologias, Mathias Poledna described it as being “A kind of choreography of objects that traces the outlines of and transitions between, typology, historicity, abstraction, historical documentation and an aesthetic of commerce…
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Autorskou tvorbu Tomáše Svobody charakterizuje konceptuální zacházení se zvoleným médiem. Ať už pracuje s malbou, fotografií, filmem, performancí či jiným způsobem umělecké akce, zaujímá strukturalistické hledisko, v němž se médium jeví jako určitý znakový systém…
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In 2002, Martin Arnold realized a rather ambitious project in the venue of the Vienna Kunsthalle – a series of three digital video installations titled Deanimated. Within the overall body of work of this most illustrious figure of Austrian experimental cinema (found footage), this gallery triptych represents a radical shift from his original stance as a film-maker…
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Józef Robakowski is a Polish media artist; a creator of numerous experimental films, videos, photographs, installations, objects, drawings and documentaries on art. He is equally active as the author of theoretical texts and as a pedagogue; an organiser of varied multi-media events and he has been involved in the establishment of experimental groups and associations (including ZERO-61 (1961–1969), WARSZTAT FORMY FILMOWEJ (1970– present))…
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The Finish photographer Ville Lenkkeri graduated from photography programs both at FAMU (Czech National Film School) in Prague and UIAH in Helsinki. His current work bears traits of the so-called Helsinki School, which builds on strong visuality and sophisticatedly working with subdued colors…
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Isabel Heimerdinger, a German visual artist, has for a long time worked to create new contexts for film expressed in its particular artistic appropriations. Meanwhile it is not technique that defines her work, nor is it the medium that she uses…
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“Going from painting to moving image is like running into the countryside.” (Dana Balážová, 2011) This is how we could characterize the development of both Katarína Hládeková and Anna Balážová’s work of the past two years…
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The recent exhibition “Boris Reznikov on the Set of Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet” was held at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, between March 6 and April 29, 2012. It showcased photographs taken on set by Boris Reznikov, the official photographer of the film…
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In the last few years, Dorothee von Rechenberg has focused primarily on black and white photography. She is composing her photographs within series (e.g. recut, 2009, insomnia, 2008, songline, 2007)…
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Jiří Kotrla absolvoval brněnskou FaVU, během svého působení v Portugalsku realizoval projekty rozvíjející aspekty mediální paměti klasických filmových technologií. Příkladem je kamerová jízda na opuštěném nádraží v Barreiru (Passing New History, společně s Radoslavem Zrubcem, 2009), která se stala obrazově snovou metaforou k východiskům studia mediálního obrazu, ale i odkazem k textům francouzského myslitele Michela de Certeau…
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Last year’s theme-based issue of Critical Inquiry magazine – one of the outcomes of a three-year research project entitled “Aesthetics after Photography” – explored various issues of photography and art from the 1960s until the present…
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Lucia Sceranková places great emphasis on the preparation and production of spaces that come to define her subsequent photographs. The process of this creation/work and what happens prior to pressing the shutter release are important…
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A woman walks down a path, gets into a car, gets out somewhere else, walks into a building and down a hallway into a sparsely furnished flat, looks out the window, sits down at a desk, leafs through some papers, smokes a cigarette, and upsets a glass of water…
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Most of Filip Cenek’s pieces do not get to be seen in permanent form, even if they are based on the same photographs, videos and animations, or a unifying literary fragment. Their installations, unique in relation to “finite” spaces, promote an effect of estrangement for both the author and the viewer…
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Viktor Takáč is a rigorous analyst of the moving image. His video-films are based on randomly found places and bizarre situations, or, rather, the subjects of these are precisely planned and subsequently composed of the photographs or footage he takes…
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The work of German photographer Candida Höfer divides, in an interesting way, the art and art theoretical scenes. Whereas a majority of the specialized public enthusiastically accepts the monumental and, in a positive sense of the word, elitist character of her photographic oeuvre, it strikes the others as spectacular and coldly decadent…
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On February 1, 1929, the Film Guild Cinema opened at 52 W. 8th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. In the promotion materials, invitation and short press releases published on the occasion of its inauguration, it was billed as The First 100% Cinema in the United States…
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